The Year of Living Questions

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

--Rainer Maria Rilke

Green Vibrations

I am thinking over a phrase of Annie Dillard's this morning, encountered in her collection of meditations on writing, appropriately titled The Writing Life. "There is no shortage of good days," she writes. "It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading -- that is a good life."

It's an uncomfortably wise insight. Although I have never confused sensation-seeking with writerly preparation, it has nevertheless been an underlying motivator in many things I have done. I always feel an anxiety about missing things, or allowing experiences to remain undiscovered. In Jackson, it is some mythical canyon that haunts me: somehow obscure and crystalline; a field of wildflowers where no one is walking; a view from so high, that as I wrote once, "I can feel the cold on my eyes." Other places, it is about the potential of art, the potential of hitting just the right point of intoxication on food or wine, the potential that some person hides behind one of many turned shoulders, and that person has keys to unlock any number of things. It's what leaves me hungrily scanning the walls of cathedrals, looking for the original, homely paintwork, obsessed with even the humblest joints of the ceilings. I'd hate to think I missed it.

I think my assumption has always been that these moments of beauty will accrete, one layer of sand to the next, to make my soul altogether something fine and glittering, honed carefully and curated as I go. And yet, I often write so little of it. Why, I wonder.

Summer is upon us now, with its exquisite songbirds and trails, cleared at last of snow. In mid-May, it seemed that all the aspens and cottonwoods turned green at once. I thought of it as a susurration of some kind, completely undetectable to human ears, but nevertheless communicating spring through the groves, vibrating the landscape into a new incarnation of being. The green was so new; the operation itself so delicate. A miracle was gifted in a day, but a quotidian miracle, too, happening each May in a sudden sweep. And then summer. And then the sun and the obstinate eggshell blue.

It is a time of golden water in the evenings, and green trees etched in gold around it. The yellow of balsamroot flowers and the sentinels of violet lupine and monk's hood. Baby elk, tremulous on newly-jointed legs; a rather fat and pleased-with-himself marmot, like a caricature of an English friar; a miniscule duck who fed at the edge of a quiet stream, buoyantly bobbing up after each quarry.

A hard thing it is, to revise, when all of this is happening outside. The outdoors are a constant imprecation to leave the room and abandon the work. That mythical canyon taunts like a mirage. But ho hum,  another chance to gather strength and plug along anyway. To remember the life of the spirit. So many moments of muster, and then finally, I write about this color of green at last, and let go of that last nagging sensation, returning concentration to where it ought to be.

Marking Time With Words

Spring is a brown time in Wyoming. I noticed this anew as my plane flew low over the hills two days ago. Each time, I can pick out the road that curves against the bluffs south of town, and then we fly over one of the low hills that marks my own neighborhood, over the entirety of the town grid, and touch down--spectacularly--at the base of the snowcapped Tetons. That's what I noticed, however, as we flew over: a neverending swath of brown, and all the mountains still encased in snow. Bison welcomed me back, as did an intrepid weasel that somehow snuck into our suburban home, crept into my room, and, in illustration of every possible rodent horror story, hopped right onto the bed. This is the west, after all.

I was flying back from Seattle, my home of seven years, and where I had spent two luxurious weeks visiting with friends, celebrating a wedding, and remembering the riot of spring. Cherry blossoms, dogwoods, tulips, magnolias. Spring in Seattle is a time of carpet petals and palm-sized camellia flowers that fall, often unblemished, directly to the grass. It is a time of chill winds and spitting rain and oddly timed sunbreaks, too, but I couldn't help but feel that I'd picked an almost tropical locale as snow continued to drift in my hometown and the thermometer dropped back down to winter temperatures.

What does it feel like to be back in Seattle? It's an odd disjunction--more familiar to me in many senses than my life in Jackson, and yet the tugs of loyalty to Wyoming were there, too, as if, in choosing to spend these months in the mountains, I must swear fealty again to my vision, even as the warmth of my friends and the verdant scenery were things I could slip back into so naturally. I caught up with my friend Jessica, who now makes her home in the Bay Area after years spent in Seattle as well, and she remarked that visiting the city now feels like it once did to visit her hometown. This seems about right: the instant, comforting embrace of the known, not tinged by nostalgia, but rather by a deep sense of recognition. A marvel over what has changed, and yet an ease with what has not been forgotten: the buses I take, where we should choose a restaurant, where I should buy a book of poetry.

It's been months since I've ridden buses, and while I sat on one reading, I realized that the city had created a mode of thought for me in the rhythm of how I got from place to place; in the cadence of my walking, in my notation of businesses I passed, in my constant state of being around others in public spaces, and yet often burrowed into my own solitude. It was the same as I rode the bus from Portland to Seattle on a Sunday evening, a continuing drama of glowering clouds, rainbows, and sun outside the windows. I tried to take a picture of the clouds out of the glass, but I ended up taking one with the strip of setting sun from the opposite aisle smeared along the bottom of the frame. Like a double exposure or two counterpanes, tissue-thin, existing side by side. This was the feeling of being in Seattle. My old life close enough to taste and easy enough to resume, my new one waiting anxiously, afraid of being abandoned.

And yet. Part of living in Jackson feels like coming back to the beginning in the best way. Here, I have found new ways to think, too. In cars, playing my music and singing along like a banshee. On long, aimless walks while our dog Iris bounds unbidden into fields to chase the birds. In the feeling of electricity whenever a coyote howl pierces the dead of night or yes, even when a weasel sneaks into the house and brings everything that is outside, inside. I know the big question hangs there, swollen with the accumulation of months: Where will you go? And the truth is, I still don't know. I suppose I am still living the questions. I suppose my journey is meant to go a little further. At least the scenery will not disappoint. And at least I am reminded of the dear friends who support me and mean so much to me and whose much-needed company will no doubt buoy me through the rest of this month and beyond.

I am also turning 30 a week from today. It's a milestone that I want to meet with a marker. This week, I will complete my book. So, when I say I am marking time with words, I mean it very explicitly. This is the week. I will be holing myself up for as long as it takes so that I can emerge on the dawning day of my next decade and know that one thing I did in my twenties was finish my book. I will put the dot at the bottom of that question mark. I will move to the next sentence. And then, it will be time to move onto living another question, to finding another path in the trees.

Brushstrokes

One more day left in the Year of Being Brave.  Yesterday, I got out of bed and looked out the window and was shocked into full consciousness by the sight of a little red-breasted bird sitting on one of the crystalline branches right in front of me.  That little streak of red on an otherwise white, glittering world reminded me that so much of winter in Wyoming lies in brushstrokes: the planar snow, the dusky shadows of the trees, the days that lack dimension as layer of layer of snow fold down vs. the days that  are etched in true bluebird blue.  Those days dawn with an almost shocking clarity.  When I lived in Seattle, those skies -- so full of pigment -- were one of the main things I missed about home.  The dense, mysterious snowstorms have their own beauty, however, not least being the anticipation of skiing fresh powder...

It's time to set a goal for next year, but I'm not sure what it will be yet.  Last year, it came to me on a wan, sunny morning as I sat on a bench on Orcas Island, facing the water.  That's when The Year of Being Brave declared itself as the goal and the mission for 2012.  Like anything, the grandiose title was truly a product of incremental changes and decisions, as well as setbacks, because, well, that's life, isn't it?  This year has tested me in ways that I couldn't have imagined: some of it has led me to immense happiness and pride, and some to sadness and discouragement.  One of the oddest things that occurred was that life began to imitate art, the very art I'd set out to create.  It's a bit eerie.  Someday I'd love to share that story, but first things first: the book.

I tabulated today, and the first draft is very close to done.  Of course, after that there will be days and weeks and months (??!?) of polishing and reconfiguring and quilting together the two narratives.  But the actual writing part is definitely on the wane.  At this point, I am happy to report that I am as comfortable in the skin of my second character as I was with my first.  If anything, she has become my virtual stand-in -- the more neutral, dispassionate voice.  I wrote a love scene for her today and felt almost suspicious of myself.  Was I subconsciously writing it for myself?  Hard to say.  I have learned through this process that spending so much time with one work is often glorious rather than limiting.  So much expansion is possible, so many tangents (even if I need to edit them out later).  Overall, the process is more freeing than expected.  So, yay!  Onwards...

Friends, so many of you have accomplished amazing feats this year.  What are your goals and purposes for the coming year?  I'd love to hear.  In the meantime, I'll wait for that stroke of clarity that will hopefully arrive on the morning of January 1.  

Potent Quotables

After the passing of poet Jack Gilbert, my friend Jessica wrote a beautiful tribute to him on her blog, and mentioned that his Paris Review interview was one of her favorites. Intrigued, I read it myself, and it's full of wisdom and just the kind of love we should wish from great artists.  Here is my favorite quote:

"I think serious poems should make something happen that’s not correct or entertaining or clever. I want something that matters to my heart, and I don’t mean “Linda left me.” I don’t want that. I’ll write that poem, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about being in danger—as we all are—of dying. How can you spend your life on games or intricately accomplished things? And politics? Politics is fine. There’s a place to care for the injustice of the world, but that’s not what the poem is about. The poem is about the heart. Not the heart as in “I’m in love” or “my girl cheated on me”—I mean the conscious heart, the fact that we are the only things in the entire universe that know true consciousness. We’re the only things—leaving religion out of it—we’re the only things in the world that know spring is coming." --Jack Gilbert

We are also the only things in the entire universe who know winter is coming.

Winter's Teeth

It seems only yesterday that I was rhapsodizing about autumn.  Then this happened:

You may be able to make out the Wyoming flag flapping in the breeze.  A metallic edge is in the air and crystals are forming on our windshields at night.  In high school, I drove my sister to school in the mornings and we were always running so late (totally my fault) that I would scrape the tiniest little square using my driver's license and then force her to roll down the window and watch the edge of the road as we careened into the school parking lot and tried to make it to class before the 7:55 bell.  We were successful about 50% of the time.  Scraping a windshield in 10 degree weather on a dark, moonless morning with snow clogging the bottom of your flats? Probably not the most romantic part of Wyoming.  But, of course, even with the trees bared and the grasses grayed, a beauty of desolation remains.

In the past two weeks, a lot of things have happened, some of which I am choosing not to write about here.  I visited my grandfather and family in Dayton, Ohio; I started reading a book about the tracing of a family heritage through objects.  I started writing a children's book.  I wrote a description of Seymour, Indiana for a hotels website.  I want to write at length about stories and families and the beautiful sculptures of glass, light, and stainless steel that I saw at the Dayton Art Museum. Several friends have been blessed with new joys, and some have met new griefs. And, the other things that have happened...well, they have renewed my gratitude for life and for the people I love in ways I could not have imagined.  It truly is a gift, this life, and being able to see it as a gift...well, at the risk of sounding trite, that's a gift, too.

Also, I got a library card.


One thing I love about my life here is the repetition of my walks.  Readers of this blog may even notice that many photographs are taken from the same areas.  Each time I tackle Game Creek or Cache Creek
or what is fondly known in town as "the high school butte," I feel rewarded with the incremental changes to the landscape I see.  Geese were migrating, and now four swans are flapping by like white linen on a windy day.  No more two-stepping herons in the field; but on a still night, the coyotes whine.  The yellow leaves I love are also gone, but in their place are bundles of ice, binding the grass together in little clumps, little secrets.  The stars, even, seem colder and more inscrutable.  The characters in my book feel ignored; they, too, are cold and fractious and on edge.  That's what this in-between season is all about.  It's about the portent of changes, and oddly, amidst the tumult, about settling in.  It will be a long winter.  Better keep writing.  Better keep walking.  Better keep pausing to say thank you, under my breath, and yet loud enough for the world to hear.

Rounding the Seasons

A couple of days ago, I found myself longing for a specific poem about autumn.  I knew I had read it before, and that it was a well-known, oft-anthologized work.  I riffled through my memory, recalling that the poem was infused with a sense of drowsiness, the sharp smell of a cider press, the subtle-sweet scent of autumn's glorious decay.  Was it Yeats?  Something about gold, or another poem about the beloved "quiet one"?  Was it Dylan's young boy, singing in his chains by the sea?

But no, the poem I sought was Keats' "To Autumn."  "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" it begins, full of praise and exhortation.  There is a cider press, and a winnowing wind, and the long locks of autumn, golden in the sun.  The poem is infused with a honeyed sense of time, with languour, with, really, all those lovely -our words that signify leisure and slow time.   It sounds a bit like the autumn I am inhabiting right now--one I have not experienced in this specific setting for eleven years.  And oh, how worthy of an ode it is.

I smelled the first intimations weeks ago as I hiked into the Teton Range with my family on a very hot and sunny day.  The soft, sweet smell of the yellowing heart-shaped aspen leaves immediately conjured the first signs of an autumn I had completely forgotten.  I thought of all of the poets who have dedicated their work to each of the four seasons, and I listened to Vivaldi's "Four Seasons"--the alternating frenzy and light strings of a year's passage.  In all the years of living elsewhere, autumn was always the season I had missed.  And how could I really say I had come home again until I experienced its return--right here?  I realize now that we can never truly love--or know--a place until we have experienced it in its roundness.  Every day is a gradation in color, every day adds a new, delicate tine to the comb of the chilling breeze.  Every day is a revelation.

This morning, I drove the curve of the highway, returning home towards town, and saw the crest of the Grand Teton peeking out over mellow, pastoral hills and fields, its crags just rinsed in snow.  My soundtrack for the drive--Prokofiev's "Romeo & Juliette"--swelled with grandeur during my favorite portion of the score, which I will unashamedly admit is the ultra-romantic balcony love theme.  (So beautiful!)  Ah, yes, there loomed my beloved.  Sighted with full orchestra accompaniment.  There have been so many moments like this for me in the past month that startle me into feeling vibrantly alive and full of an intense, heart-pressing gratitude for being here at this moment in time.  For seeing this place that has been relegated into memory for eleven years through a newly-discovered season, and a newly-discovered me breathing within it.

***

(I realize all of these blogs from Jackson have ended on somewhat of a heart-swelling note of effusion so far, but what can I say?  Effusive seems to be the name of the game for me right now...  As Modest Mouse would say, Blame It On the Tetons.)

(

Home Again, Home Again: First Dispatch From the Year of Being Brave

This summer, I left my job and life in Seattle to move back to Jackson, Wyoming and finish my novel.

I woke up the morning after leaving Seattle in a tent 30 miles from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho to the sound of thunder and droplets of rain hitting my nose.  The previous evening had been so mild that my Dad and I had opted not to cover my brother's tent with a rainfly, and after sitting around the fire and drinking a glass or two of wine, I fell asleep looking up through the transparent netting towards the tops of Ponderosa pines.  The campsite was one of only two indicated on our indispensable road atlas, and after driving two country routes past "towns" with atmospheric names like Rose Lake, we found ourselves up high, flushing deer from their hidden hedgerow posts and passing old barns and cabins crumbling in on themselves.  (A note: decaying barns in fields are like my favorite thing, ever).  The next day, I listened to an interview with the author Deborah Magpie Earling, whose grandfather drowned in that very lake.  His son always remembered the sweat-stained hat that lay--abandoned--after he vanished beneath the glassy surface.  Oh, yes, I thought, it's totemic details like this that make us write in the first place.

Sleeping in a Forest Service campground after a long drive, partially on dirt road, seemed like exactly the right thing.  Even though I was still hundreds of miles from Jackson, my hometown, those kinds of woods are home, and so are the little outposts within them.  The campsite attendant camping there for the summer with his thick Northeastern accent; the little wooden port-o-potty and well structures; the process of walking out the flattest section of the ground and strategically pitching the tent to face the morning sun.  Those steps have been with me since I was very, very young.  

Of course, the thunderstorm and whipping winds dashed all attempts to rise with the sun or eat oatmeal cooked on the campstove, so off we drove as the sun rose (something I rarely see, being so much a night owl).  All of I-90, the route we'd taken straight from Seattle and eventually into Montana, proved to be a rich vein of memory.  As childhood memories tend to do, various family camping caravans and passings had collapsed in on themselves, but as the names of towns rose on green highway signs, the distinct places came back.  Wallace, ID where we had once visited a defunct brothel and seen a list of "acts" and prices taped unceremoniously over the light switch; "Anaconda Opportunity," surely one of the most delightful road signs in America; Deer Lodge, MT, home of the old territorial prison and an old car museum and a preserved rancher baron's property.  As a child, I'd keened towards every hint of History with a capital "H" and had probably driven the whole family crazy by insisting that we stop at all ghost towns and gravesites.  Sometimes, I was disappointed to find that my excavations of cross-beam cabins produced nothing more than beer cans and the remnants of campfires.  But nevertheless, a sense of struggle and effort underlies even lonely highways like I-90 and the empty fields and thick forests that mainly surround it.

My first glimpse of Jackson itself was through a haze of forest fire smoke, but the joyous greetings of our dogs remained the same.  And so now I'm here.  My trappings of Seattle life lie in a clutter of boxes and bags in my brother's borrowed room (the little kid's room, it still seems, even though Ben is 25 years old now).  In the morning, I wake to the sound of my parents going to work and the dogs' nails clicking back and forth along the tiled highway.  At night, I go to bed to the sound of coyotes wailing somewhere in the fields, and Canadian geese land and take off from the same fields all day long, honking and stitching together their ragged V-shape.  The aspens pattern our drawn shades like static, ticking and shivering.

Wyoming.  A place where you can go home again and ride around with one of your oldest friends in an old Ford Lariat pick-up truck and go to look at your old house on Angus Drive.  It looks the same from the street, but the well-worn trail you used to trudge into the willow thicket has been swallowed by a new house on the corner lot.  The trees are much taller.  Oddly, everything seems bigger rather than smaller.  And so you can go home again, but someone will have built a house over some part of your memory; a new generation of kids are leaving their inner tubes to dry in your old yard; the late-night diner is long-closed.  The landscape, however, neither remembers nor forgets you.  And this has always been the comfort of home.

(P.S. My friend Jessica Day is one of the people who inspired me with her own brave, astounding writing journey this year.  She gave me the excellent advice that blogging is like the warm-up run for the writing ahead, and keeps you accountable to your goals.  Her own blogging on the subject is so rich and lovely that I really must urge you to go here immediately and read it.  My first entree is just a pale copy in comparison!)

Just Shelved

The Rings of Saturn by Winfried Georg Sebald

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The past year has been my year of reading European travelogues--Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, Rebecca West, Lawrence Durrell, and now W.G. Sebald. Except none of these books are actually travelogues, any more than a novel is simply a story. They are compendiums. They are philosophical treatises. They are everything. Only--the writers have composed them while rambling. Place looms down into the works. Place catalyzes.

The Rings of Saturn is one of the most beautiful of all. Temporally, the author walks through an area that I myself have seen, so my love wells a little from nostalgia. Even without a familiarity with the Anglian countryside, however, there is no doubt this book is a masterpiece. I don't use that word lightly, but if a work of art can make one see the beauty and inscrutability and humor and cruelty and cravenness and mechanization of human beings side by side with the mysterious things they have built and created, and condemn the darkness of our souls, while still wanting to live, while still, in fact, loving that most tenuous of gifts--well, then isn't that work of art doing all that it is possible to do? Along the way, I learned about the last Chinese empress, silkworms, abandoned missile silos, crumbling country estates, Joseph Conrad, Chateaubriand, Rembrandt's painting of a dissection...I learned so much. Each section ended with a note of pleasure, like a cello string being plucked deep inside the sternum. I dreamed all kinds of beautiful dreams when I finished the book. I was changed by it.

View all my reviews

A Wish

Through playing of The Nutcracker, all raindrops shall be transmogrified into snowflakes.